digest() and hmac() function results to lower case

Hi all,

Why was it decided that the results of digest() and hmac() would be 
case-insensitive.
I realize that the algorithms base-64 and hex *could* return upper or 
lower case letters, but is it really that hard for implementations to push 
the results to lower case?
It just seems strange to push that translation onto the application author 
or form author.

It's not a big deal either way, but I'm doing the spec work now, and it 
just looks so odd to say:

<eg>digest('abc', 'SHA-1', 'hex')</eg>
<p>returns <phrase diff="add">a string that under case-insenstive 
comparison is equal to </phrase> <code>
a9993e364706816aba3e25717850c26c9cd0d89d</code>.</p>

Cheers,
John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
STSM, Interactive Documents and Web 2.0 Applications
Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com 

Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer
Blog RSS feed: 
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/rss/JohnBoyer?flavor=rssdw